RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remember-when-inflation-was-just-going-to-be-transitory/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=third

So said President Biden last year. I don’t think many people believed it then and they sure don’t now.

It’s bad and will get worse, argues Timothy Nash of Northwood University’s McNair Center in this TownHall article.

Get ready for “Higher prices for basketballs, lipstick, pacemakers and automobiles — brought to you by the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Biden Administration’s Green Energy policies and Putin’s foreign policy,” Nash writes.

Under Obama, Trump, and now Biden, the federal government has been creating money to cover its prodigious spending at an unprecedented pace. That’s actually what inflation is — the loss of value in the currency is just one of the consequences.

One of Nash’s key points is that Biden’s “green” energy policies have made a bad situation much worse. He observes, “If U.S. oil markets had remained less regulated under the Biden Administration, domestic and global oil supplies would be higher today. The price of oil per barrel on the global exchanges would be lower and Vladimir Putin’s ability to fund the acts of a tyrannical despot would be greatly reduced, while simultaneously validating that freedom and free enterprise is the best way to allocate resources globally.”

The American people are suffering as a result of our ravenous federal government, led by politicians who apparently believe that there are no adverse effects from their unbridled lust for spending and  control. Of course, Biden and his minions will try to pin the blame elsewhere, but I’m optimistic that more and more Americans are starting to realize that the problem is the Leviathan on the Potomac.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/27/hunter-biden-joe-biden-president-business-dealings

Influence-peddling is Washington’s ‘spectator sport’ – but now there’s an interest in taking a closer look at the president’s son.

To the political right in America, Joe Biden’s son Hunter has been the gift that keeps on giving, with his public struggles with addiction, scandalous private life and tangled business life. To the left, Hunter’s travails are dismissed as a Republican political obsession and a talking point for tabloid journalism and internet gossip.

But last week, two witnesses called before a federal grand jury seated in Wilmington, Delaware, which is looking into the tax affairs of the president’s son, made the subject harder to avoid.

First there was Lunden Roberts, with whom Biden has a three-year-old unacknowledged child. Then Zoe Kestan, an ex-girlfriend and lingerie and textile designer, spent five hours giving testimony on Biden’s spending, including – reportedly – stays at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where, in 2018, allegedly, Biden was preoccupied with cooking crack cocaine.

Wretched and salacious as that sounds, much of Hunter Biden’s story, detailed at length in his autobiography Beautiful Things, published last year, tends that way. “I’m not a curio or a sideshow to a moment in history,” Biden claimed in his book. “I’ve worked for someone other than my father, [I] rose and fell on my own.”

But that’s not how Joe Biden’s political enemies see it.

Donald Trump tried to make issue out of Hunter’s business dealings in Ukraine, Russia and China, which included high paid consultancies and gifts, and allegations that, as vice-president, Joe Biden had shaped American foreign policy in Ukraine to benefit his son.

For Trump, it backfired, when efforts to uncover information about the Bidens and Ukraine helped to trigger his first impeachment. Then came the surfacing of Hunter Biden’s missing laptop, with its library of decadent pictures and business email chains, mysteriously left at a Wilmington repair shop, which found its way to Republican political operatives including Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon, plus the rightwing press and the FBI.

On the political flip-side, House intelligence committee chair Adam Schiff said the laptop was a “smear” from Russian intelligence, and 50 former intelligence officials said it was probably Russian disinformation. Now, however, almost no one disputes its authenticity.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/02/28/this_time_politics_should_actually_stop_at_waters_edge_147261.html

“We must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge,” insisted Sen. Arthur Vandenberg on the Senate floor in March of 1947. At the time, the Michigan Republican chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Harry Truman, a Democrat, was formulating a policy of containment to constrain Russian imperialism.

In the decades since, Vandenberg’s words have generally been ignored. Republicans and Democrats often clash during foreign policy crises, sometimes debating in good faith over principled disagreements, sometimes leveling cheap attacks in hopes of scoring political points.

But Vandenberg’s principle can and should guide the behavior of our politicians as they respond to Vladimir Putin’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. This is not wishful thinking. Several factors of this crisis incentivize bipartisanship.

First, Putin is a manifestly dangerous force. As foreign policy analysts Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, a victorious Putin would instigate “a state of permanent economic war,” with the United States and Europe levelling  “sweeping sanctions, which Russia is likely to parry with cyber-measures and energy blackmailing.” Russia will also seek to encourage, “through methods fair and foul,” political division within Europe in hopes of weakening the NATO alliance. Neither of the United States’ two major political parties should want to live or govern in a world in which Putin has succeeded in becoming, as Fix and Kimmage foresee, “an anarchic presence” who sows instability. If there ever was a country-before-party moment, this is it.

Second, we already have a bipartisan consensus on a key point. “The President has been very clear that U.S. troops will not be fighting in Ukraine,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Friday. Republicans in Congress have not argued otherwise. To date, disagreements between the Biden administration and congressional Republicans involve the timing and scope of economic sanctions, which is not the stuff of deeply divisive debate.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/27/the-suicide-of-a-january-6-defendant-they-broke-him/

Matthew Perna did nothing wrong on January 6, 2021.

The Pennsylvania man walked through an open door on the Senate side of the building shortly before 3 p.m. that afternoon. Capitol police, shown in surveillance video, stood by as hundreds of Americans entered the Capitol. Wearing a “Make America Great Again” sweatshirt, Perna, 37, left after about 20 minutes.

Less than two weeks later, Perna was ensnared in what the former top U.S. prosecutor called a “shock and awe” campaign to round up Trump supporters and deter them from demonstrating at Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021. After he discovered his image on the FBI’s most wanted list for January 6, Perna immediately contacted his local FBI office and voluntarily submitted to questioning; on January 18, six FBI agents arrested Perna at his home.

His life from that point turned into a nightmare. Perna was indicted by a grand jury in February 2021 on four counts including obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing misdemeanors. Despite his nonviolent participation in the events of that day—he did not assault anyone, carry a weapon, or vandalize property—Biden’s Justice Department and local news media nonetheless made his life pure hell.

Whenever his hometown paper, the Sharon Herald, published an article on its social media account about Perna, the majority of replies were “horrible and brutal,” his aunt, Geri Perna, told me on the phone Sunday. After more than a year of legal and public torture, Perna saw no way out.

On Friday night, Matthew Perna hung himself in his garage.